January 30, 2012

Claremont McKenna College, a small, prestigious California school, said Monday that for the past six years, it has submitted false SAT scores to publications like U.S. News & World Report that use the data in widely followed college rankings.

In a message e-mailed to college staff members and students, Claremont McKenna’s president since 1999, Pamela B. Gann, wrote that “a senior administrator” had taken sole responsibility for falsifying the scores, admitted doing so since 2005, and resigned his post.

The critical reading and math scores reported to U.S. News and others “were generally inflated by an average of 10-20 points each,” Ms. Gann wrote. For the class that entered the school in September 2010 — the most recent set of figures made public —the combined median score of 1,400 was reported as 1,410, she said, while the 75th percentile score of 1,480 was reported as 1,510.

This doesn't look like a lot, but note that Claremont McKenna is 9th among liberal arts colleges on the USN&WR list. In other words, it's right on the bubble of being Top Ten or not Top Ten, which is the kind of thing that means a lot for bragging rights at extended family dinners in San Jose and Seoul. So, every little bit helps.

Is this some unique scandal, or is it only news because the college got caught? Does USN&WR impose rigorous audits upon data submitted to them by colleges? I doubt it.

The president of Reed, that anti-affirmative action hippie college in Portland that is becoming a rare outpost of the old, weird America, has pointed out that lots of colleges game the USN&WR system by issuing anti-SAT rhetoric, denouncing the SAT as biased, so therefore they're going to allow students to apply without submitting SATs. This lets them let in athletes, quota kids, rich kids, and the like without it having any effect on the college's SAT scores in USN&WR. (The magazine routinely downgrades Reed in its rankings.)

By the way, I wrote an article about Pamela B. Gann and Claremont McKenna for The American Conservative in 2004: Hate Hoax.

62 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Reed, anti-Affirmative Action? I poked around on their web site a bit and they look like standard-issue fans of the policy to me. The president even has a long article arguing for using explicitly remedial rationales for AA rather than cloaking it in "diversity" mumbo-jumbo necessary sneak past the court challenges.

""""In a recent essay in The Times, Lawrence Summers, the former president of Harvard University, wrote about preparing American students for the future. In the essay, he said that international experience was essential, arguing that English’s emergence as the global language makes the investment in other languages less essential.

Does he have a point? Even though Americans aren’t as monolingual as you might think, is learning a language other than English a worthwhile investment? """"

They have 6 people respond to that question and not one person backs up Lawrence Summers. I do like the "If you don't learn languages, learn accents" answer though.

"Later, sitting in my dining room, all I could think was: I'm no hero. I hit a man with a baseball bat. A brown-skinned man. A poor man. Was this the "diversity" I had bargained for? This was the bat I had used growing up in relentlessly suburban, middle-class Lexington, Massachusetts, where diversity meant playing with a few Catholics and an occasional Jew. Six years ago, I had moved my family to Boston's South End, reveling in its economic and racial variety. Did I feel virtuous living there? Our son's school was a model of statistical integration: one-third black, one-third white, one-third "other." We met with neighbors on the multiracial council. Our boys played with black kids who lived down the block. The Latino guy across the street repaired our car. We sat on the front stoop on summer evenings and sipped Chardonnay while the world cruised by."

There's plenty of contempt for languages in the mathematics-influenced social sciences. Summers isn't alone. I once met the US's foremost authority on Iranian politics, a kind of Kremlinologist of Iran. I asked him how long it took to learn Farsi. He didn't know a word, it wasn't worth the investment of time, he explained. He read the CIA translations of Iranian newspapers and newscasts, which was plenty.

It's made a lot of money for Mort Zuckerman; thanks to him we all learned Duke and USC are academically prestigious, though the law school rankings are the funniest of all. Milk that sucker for all it's worth.

p.s. US News claims they rank Reed on publicly available data (the college staff supposedly do not submit the questionnaire). Shouldn't they rank ALL of them on publicly available data? What about crime statistics? Johns Hopkins for instance.

Am seeking a catchy trade name for my "Zillow U." start-up. So far I've considered AlmaMatters, HBomb.tv, and Grottlesex.com, though I hope Morrissey's not lawyered up and the last one was merely an SEO play

I'm responding to the completely off-topic comment, which I think is frankly more interesting even than Reed College's affirmative action policy.

My personal experience with this is that my attempt to learn a foreign language at school was a failure, though with the advantage of hindsight alot of the problem was that my teachers were absolutely awful. But I've been able to pick up a working conversational knowledge of the language of some of the countries I've visited, as long as they speak a Romance or Germanic language (the one place where the effort was absolutely hopeless was Hungary, and Hungarians I have known have advised me not to bother trying to learn Hungarian). And I can speak my wife's language, which is not English, competently without any formal training.

Based on my experiences, my take is that language is much more of a utility than many people, particularly academics, seem to think. Its more akin to knowing how to repair a car than studying literature. If you absolutely need to learn a language, its not that difficult, after all small children do it, but its very hard to pick up in a formal classroom setting, and then you have the issue of whether the instruction itself is competent.

Now the United States is a continental country where historically most people didn't even hold passports (I've been told that there was an uptick in passport applications when they started being required to visit Canada). Most Americans don't even leave the United States! Even elite folks like Summers operate in a sort of bubble where everyone they encounter speak English, unless they actively seek to leave the bubble, which seems to be discouraged. So for practical purposes, Americans are better off concentrating on improving their knowledge of many other things than foreign languages. I guess this means I sort of agree with Summers, though at least for different reasons.

There is an argument that it is much easier to learn an language when you are young, but it seems that in this context "young" means "small child", ie kindergarten and the early grades. By the time foreign language instruction is actually offered, in the later grades, its too late. Its probably better to devote resources to other things in high school and find a way to make language instruction more available for adults to access when they need it.

A freshman-year friend decided to try his luck with walk-on tryouts for our college's basketball team. An assistant coach went down the line of young men asking them their name and height. Everyone seemed to be adding an inch or two, so when the coach reached my friend he said, "When I came in I was 6'1", but I guess I must be 6'3" now." He got a dirty looks.

Academics get paid princely salaries for faculty and administrative jobs that are about as hard as a typical sophomore year at Cal State University, Chico. With all the time they have on their hands they can militate for diversity, volunteer as Obamabots, and raise uber-kiddies with stratospheric SAT scores and piano recitals at Carnegie-INTEL Hall.

Claremont McKenna was just taking the equivalent of the next logical step: optionally reporting of admitted students' SAT scores.

Quantitative metrics of ability, effort and merit like the SAT have long been under assault. They reduce diversity and diminish the competitiveness of children of the wealthy and powerful - the stated and unstated goals of admissions.

The admission form could be simplified by asking only two questions: (1) Your parents' and extended family's hard and soft assets and (2) your ethnicity.

explicitly remedial rationales for AA rather than cloaking it in "diversity" mumbo-jumbo

Don't you get it? There's nothing standard issue about that, because while it would still be opposed by some, at least it would be honest. The worst part about the "diversity" rationale are the lies, i.e. that blacks get low SAT scores because the tests are biased, and that seeding prestige campuses with blacks somewhow provides whites with a valuable "perspective." No, if they're there for any reason, it's to absorb white middle-class attitude and work ethic, to escape the ghetto mentality. No other reason. Reed's approach, assuming it exists, is the only one that permits this.

well, it's also true that reed isn't a good college anymore. they've gone the same route as brown has. the administration at reed can correctly point out that other colleges game the system, but their college hasn't been good in decades now. it's gone way downhill.

from dealing with people under 25 on the internet - i'm starting to agree with summers.

pervasive english media proliferation, in combination with the web, is ramming english into every yonugster's mind. it's pretty common now to for me to encounter people who are 25 and who simply grew up with so much english movies, television, videos games, and internet, that they learned it by near-immersion. the way many people simply "pick up" how to touch type on a keyboard now, without any lessons, since you're essentially forced to interface with a QWERTY device every day now for standard human societal requirements.

people who you would actually want to communicate with and who can't handle basic english, may, within a decade or two, become like people who can't operate basic computer equipment - obsolete fossils. relics of a previous time period. it will only be dumb people from other nations - minimum wage, no skill, fast food, factory line, or farm worker types who are completely monolingual in their native language.

i've slowed down on my korean - because every korean would rather email or text me in english. not only do they like to practice - IT'S FASTER. it's EASIER. it has higher information density. it's the more efficient language. japanese and korean speakers prefer english. go ahead. ask them. if they're honest, they'll tell you. writing in their language is a hassle. try texting in japanese. LOL! a quick switch to english is what usually happens.

I work in institutional research, and I have never had any ranking organization audit our survey results.I don't recall our reports for accreditation being audited either, nor with IPEDS. But I'm young.

Steve, colleges routinely lie about the average test scores of their incoming class. Law schools lie about this as well. Furthermore, law schools lie about the incomes of their alumni. Plenty of low end law schools have alumni that earn less than the average union plumber, but won't admit it.

"Law students have long known that grades are important in the job search. But a new study underscores just how important they are for long-term success as well. In fact, law school grades are far more important than the prestige of the school one attends, the study’s author’s state."

Details of the study are on the net, if you want to read the details, you should google the above paragraph.

This study is a good argument for a student to accept a full scholarship at a law school that is slightly beneath him instead of paying full freight at the best law school that accepts him.

The point is that over the long term, the income that you earn as a lawyer corresponds to the IQ you are born with combined with the consistency of your work ethic - ie your grades. The same exact skills that enable you to get great grades translate more or less in to income as a lawyer. Now we all know exceptions to this rule, but the stats show that by and large grades correlate to income.

We all know plenty of law school alumni that make very little money, but this is not due to the lack of prestige of the school they went to but rather this is because these are people who lack either the IQ or the sustained work ethic that would enable them to get great grades and to produce great legal output for 60 plus hours a week

In my humble opinion if you really forced the law schools to crunch the numbers and report the truth, half the people now going to law school would get a report showing that due to their inherent lack of a genetically high enough IQ OR due to their lack of an inborn work ethic ("failure of marshmallow test") they were going to earn little money as a lawyer

Law school ONLY makes sense for people that have the ability to get great grades OR for a small number of people that have great rainmaker personalities

Better reporting of the facts will lead students to make better decisions.

Steve, by the way, I think that many of the readers of your blog are people with very high IQ who lack the work ethic or lack the motivation to put that IQ to work making a high income.

People forget that IQ is not enough, it is the focus and CONSISTENT work ethic that matters.

Hence, lawyer incomes correlating to GRADES to a much greater degree than lawyer incomes correlate to IQ

Languages are hard to learn and hard to teach, so of course there's lots of incentive to declare them irrelevant. They're also hard to fudge, as it's pretty easy to check and see if the students have learned anything. Quite true that they shouldn't be taught centered on literature. Everything Ed said is true. The Army teaches languages pretty well, in my experience. Actually, the Army (and I mean all the military, really) teaches _everything_ very well, because it has discipline and incentive, which are not to be found in most educational circles.

"Steve, by the way, I think that many of the readers of your blog are people with very high IQ who lack the work ethic or lack the motivation to put that IQ to work making a high income.

People forget that IQ is not enough, it is the focus and CONSISTENT work ethic that matters.

Hence, lawyer incomes correlating to GRADES to a much greater degree than lawyer incomes correlate to IQ"

And sometimes it's their ethics kicking in once they find out that the ends justifies the means in their chosen field. I imagine many a lackluster trial lawyer would've been great in some other specialty. What you're really describing is the personality that will do whatever it takes to win, scruples be damned, especially if everyone else behaves immorally to get ahead. Just as with college students, law students may like the process of learning more than they like praxis and would've been a better fit elsewhere career-wise. I had a similar experience upon discovering the field I'd found fascinating in high school had shifted in theoretical focus. This matters more to some people than others who are content to mold their value systems, conceptual frameworks, etc in a relativistic way.

"Actually, the Army (and I mean all the military, really) teaches _everything_ very well, because it has discipline and incentive, which are not to be found in most educational circles."

I've met 0 ex-military who came across as being as knowledgeable as a successful college student on a topic. The exceptions will be in those areas that aren't taught in academic settings. Even being more successful at teaching expressive language has its limitations. Inevitably the military can only teach in a piecemeal fashion, anathema to many of us. WRT language, what's more important is that the broader knowledge gleaned by pursuing a liberal arts education will make the person a faster study; this is because they will have extensive knowledge of history, culture or even economics that aids in comprehension.

These differences matter even more depending on what the "linguist's" job duties are. If someone were to translate newspapers then an academic knowledge of a language might be preferable to verbal fluency alone. I'm surprised no one mentioned that most people who study a foreign language in school get to a pretty high level of literacy and can often write much better than they speak. It's not as if they didn't learn anything. Furthermore, you're not likely to learn enough English by interacting online to function in an academic environment and definitely not to speak fluently. Besides, many people use translation software both ways so only appear to know someone else's language. This is probably causing some interesting distortions in meaning both ways as you might notice sometime in the comments here on iSteve.

japanese and korean speakers prefer english. go ahead. ask them. if they're honest, they'll tell you. writing in their language is a hassle. try texting in japanese. LOL! a quick switch to english is what usually happens.

Jody, give me break. How many Japanese friends do you have? I have about a dozen and ONLY ONE sends me messages in English. The rest are absolutely incapable.

So, are you of the Playboy-no-fault-divorce-Roe-deciding-decamp-to-Florida-Whoopie-cushion-humor-no-fault-auto-insuring-crush-anyone-who-questions-Social-Security 'generation' that preceded them, or the hip-hop-video-game-anal-cleft-exposing-'like'-in-every-sentence-crush-anyone-who-questions-gay-marriage 'generation' which followed?

Probably the latter, as those Boomer teachers neglected to teach the capitalization of proper nouns, e.g., 'American'.

Either way, you've supplied more evidence for my theory that, as with 'gender', any sentence with the word 'generation' is sure to be horsemanure.

a couple, but i can only go by what they tell me, and reading copies of texts and emails they forward, where 2 bilinguals have had a conversation. i do see them slip back and forth - but mainly only into japanese if they don't know a word in english. i speak like 20 words of japanese total so i personally am never in any kind of direct bilingual exchange with japanese speakers. shrug.

people who speak both languages "good enough" is what i'm talking about here - the native japanese/english "a decade or two now" people usually default to english when communicating with OTHER japanese native speakers, for efficiency reasons.

this isn't the first time i've seen this among bilinguals. that's common among english french speakers and english spanish speakers too.

japan is also a big first world nation with tons of it's own culture and stuff to do, so you could be right, most japanese citizens are never going to need learn foreign languages if they don't want to. they can stay in japan for their entire lives no problem. you don't have to learn english when your nation has 120 million people and it's own strong endogenous culture which is continously producing it's own interesting stuff.

if you don't live in such a huge nation with it's own super strong native culture which difracts the incoming english culture being projected outward from english speaking nations though...less chance you'll have the option of being so ensconced. so maybe you could say, there's still a few decent reasons to learn another language - but the list of languages you might want to learn to a reasonable degree of proficiency, has shrunk to about 5, and certainly no more than 10. probably no language with less than 100 million speakers is worth learning for practical purposes, and only for personal interest reasons. hence my korean.

"There is an argument that it is much easier to learn an language when you are young, but it seems that in this context "young" means "small child", ie kindergarten and the early grades. By the time foreign language instruction is actually offered, in the later grades, its too late. Its probably better to devote resources to other things in high school and find a way to make language instruction more available for adults to access when they need it."

The TPRS method is the way to go for teaching foreign language. When I switched to it, my kids went from struggling and remembering nothing to passing college placement tests.

"Unfortunately,these countries are less and less French or Italian. If I go to Italy, I want to see and talk to Italians, not Africans or Albanians."

Funny you should say that. I spent three weeks in Florence & Rome, last Summer, and five weeks in Rome, Naples & Sicily over the holidays - and one of the things that really struck me is that the whole country is absolutely *jammed* with Africans. "What on Earth are they all doing here," I kept asking myself.

On the plus side, they were generally very nice - and also very entrepreneurial, often making up a high proportion of the sellers in the ubiquitous street-markets.

On the minus side, one goes to Italy in hopes of immersing oneself in distinctively *Italian* culture - not only in the museums and churches, but also in the streets and by-ways. And I'm afraid that's being lost, forever.

"Funny you should say that. I spent three weeks in Florence & Rome, last Summer, and five weeks in Rome, Naples & Sicily over the holidays - and one of the things that really struck me is that the whole country is absolutely *jammed* with Africans."

Funny you should mention that; According to the site below, there are roughly 307,000 Sub-saharan African immigrants in Italy, a country with a population of roughly 60 million, about .5% of the population, or 1/200 people.

So it seems that "*jammed*" is a fairly relative term, highly colored by one's personal perspective on other things...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_immigrants_to_Italy

"i've slowed down on my korean - because every korean would rather email or text me in english. not only do they like to practice - IT'S FASTER."

Korean Hangul is completely phonetic and it's easier to read and write than Spanish, let alone English. Everyone who even begins to learn Korean, gains the ability to read perfectly within a couple of hours. Thus, written communication is swift and easy on the peninsula. It sounds like it's faster for the Koreans to email/text in English with YOU because you can't communicate in their language. In my experience, when I engage any Korean in their script, they respond in kind. When they don't, it's because i made no sense whatsoever.

"On the minus side, one goes to Italy in hopes of immersing oneself in distinctively *Italian* culture - not only in the museums and churches, but also in the streets and by-ways. And I'm afraid that's being lost, forever."

I'm anon 6:02. I am glad I got to see Italy in the 80's before it changed. I was there 10 years ago and didn't notice many immigrants either. I saw only 3 black people, all on trains.

"Funny you should mention that; According to the site below, there are roughly 307,000 Sub-saharan African immigrants in Italy, a country with a population of roughly 60 million, about .5% of the population, or 1/200 people. "

That's a lot.I wonder how many are illegal? I saw on the Net some guy from Cameroon complaining that Italians hired Italians over him. Shouldn't they? What's he even doing there. He should go back to Cameroon so he can fit it.

The point of living in or going to Italy and the like is to be around Italians. I felt more at home in Italy in the 80's than I do in the US now. Even if I could move to Italy, why would I, since it is becoming just like any other Western multicultural country?

Funny you should mention that; According to the site below, there are roughly 307,000 Sub-saharan African immigrants in Italy, a country with a population of roughly 60 million, about .5% of the population, or 1/200 people."

From the article to which you linked:

"Immigrants from Africa officially residing in Italy in 2009 numbered about 932,000 residents.[1]"

And it isn't possible that there are MORE africans in italy than the number who are "officially" there?

"So it seems that "*jammed*" is a fairly relative term, highly colored by one's personal perspective on other things..."

Or there are more than the government admits to, and they are concentrated in large cities, and particularly in those areas which tourists frequent.

But then, your posts are always colored by YOUR perspective on things.

"And it isn't possible that there are MORE africans in italy than the number who are "officially" there?"

I am reading the book In Pursuit of Italy and the author states there are unofficially 20,000 Chinese in Prato, Italy, a town of 186,000, while the govt states there are only 10,000. It's unimaginable. This is Tuscany? I don't understand this world. What are they doing there? I'll bet Italy could have gotten many people of Italian ancestry to move there if they asked.

""Immigrants from Africa officially residing in Italy in 2009 numbered about 932,000 residents.[1]"

Yeah, but according to that same article, the other 600,000+ are from North Africa;"

1.) You originally cited this article, not me.

2.) The article actually said that the other 600,000 were from north and northeast africa. "Northeast Africa", given Italy's history - probably means Somalis. I.e., a lot of those 600,000 people are indeed black africans, even if not central africans.

3.) Again, these are official figures (or rather "official" figures taken from a Wikepedia article) - there's nothing that says they are correct.

"Truth said...The Italian census is not one of my areas of knowledge."

The category "not one of "Truth"'s areas of knowedge" is so broad as to have little descriptive power.

"Truth said... I'm...smart...enough...to...admit...it."

Right. Smart. Smart, as in "believes in the existence of water-fueled cars" smart.

One of the comments stated Claremont Mckenna got caught cheating. This is not correct. President Gann reported the SAT inflation to US News after information from a tipster lead to an internal investigation. See the difference? The Dean of Admission acted in a stupid and immoral way but president Gann in my opinion did everything right. Her only mistake was to trust a long time college employee.

Here's the Google Wallet FAQ. From it: "You will need to have (or sign up for) Google Wallet to send or receive money. If you have ever purchased anything on Google Play, then you most likely already have a Google Wallet. If you do not yet have a Google Wallet, don’t worry, the process is simple: go to wallet.google.com and follow the steps." You probably already have a Google ID and password, which Google Wallet uses, so signing up Wallet is pretty painless.

You can put money into your Google Wallet Balance from your bank account and send it with no service fee.

Google Wallet works from both a website and a smartphone app (Android and iPhone -- the Google Wallet app is currently available only in the U.S., but the Google Wallet website can be used in 160 countries).

Or, once you sign up with Google Wallet, you can simply send money via credit card, bank transfer, or Wallet Balance as an attachment from Google's free Gmail email service. Here'show to do it.

(Non-tax deductible.)

Fourth: if you have a Wells Fargo bank account, you can transfer money to me (with no fees) via Wells Fargo SurePay. Just tell WF SurePay to send the money to my ancient AOL email address steveslrATaol.com -- replace the AT with the usual @). (Non-tax deductible.)

Fifth: if you have a Chase bank account (or, theoretically,other bank accounts), you can transfer money to me (with no fees) via Chase QuickPay (FAQ). Just tell Chase QuickPay to send the money to my ancient AOL email address (steveslrATaol.com -- replace the AT with the usual @). If Chase asks for the name on my account, it's Steven Sailer with an n at the end of Steven. (Non-tax deductible.)

My Book:

"Steve Sailer gives us the real Barack Obama, who turns out to be very, very different - and much more interesting - than the bland healer/uniter image stitched together out of whole cloth this past six years by Obama's packager, David Axelrod. Making heavy use of Obama's own writings, which he admires for their literary artistry, Sailer gives the deepest insights I have yet seen into Obama's lifelong obsession with 'race and inheritance,' and rounds off his brilliant character portrait with speculations on how Obama's personality might play out in the Presidency." - John Derbyshire Author, "Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics" Click on the image above to buy my book, a reader's guide to the new President's autobiography.